Chinese scientists claim they have found two new coronavirus strains in great round leaf bats, with state-funded virologists using them as proof that COVID couldn’t have possibly originated from the Wuhan lab as many suspect it did, kicking off a worldwide pandemic.

According to Chinese experts, both coronaviruses have the same genetic trait that is believed to have made the pandemic-causing strain so infectious. However, there is no way to know if the strains were artificially introduced to bats or if the variants spread to them from the already mutated COVID virus that has spread across the globe.

No sarbecoviruses (the virus family COVID belongs to) had ever been found to have a “furin cleavage site” until SARS-CoV-2 emerged in China in 2019, according to the Daily Mail.

The strange and unique trait that COVID boasts has caused experts to contend that the pandemic had a man-made origin. Beijing has claimed from the beginning it surfaced naturally.

Chinese scientists find NEW virus in bats… and claim mutation proves Covid wasn’t made in a lab https://t.co/BzL0OhrmTF pic.twitter.com/qS4Pw56QVv

— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) June 22, 2023

The findings were published in a scientific journal where the Chinese researchers claimed the emergence of the two strains “strongly” indicates SARS-CoV-2’s furin cleavage site “naturally originated.”

Independent experts take issue with the claim asserting that the study can’t draw that conclusion as the viruses discovered aren’t actually that closely related to COVID.

Neither of the two viruses, known as CD35 and CD36, has been proven capable of infecting humans yet. The researchers, who are funded by President Xi Jinping’s communist regime through China’s national research and development program, claim that the possibility of human transmission requires “further investigation.”

Dr. Richard Ebright, a biologist at Rutgers University and a lab leak proponent, charged that the paper’s conclusions do nothing to dismiss the possibility that COVID actually leaked from a Chinese lab.

“The viruses reported in the paper are not SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses,” he told the Daily Mail. “They are not even sarbecoviruses (the subgenus of viruses comprising SARS-CoV-1-related and SARS-Cov-2-related viruses). The authors of the paper classify them as hibecoviruses, placing clade hibecovirus adjacent to, but distinct from, clade sarbecovirus.”

“SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of hundreds of known sarbecoviruses that has a furin cleavage site,” Ebright noted. “This was true before the paper and remains true after the paper. No informed person would suggest that the paper, somehow, suffices dismiss the idea that COVID emerged from a lab.”

The first three people to get COVID worked in the Wuhan lab. Case closed? Maybe one of them had a bat sandwich for lunch, but this requires us to get really, really serious about the accountability issue, not be pleading w/ Beijing like a whining child for engagement & dialogue.

— James Jay Carafano (@JJCarafano) June 16, 2023

Professor Francois Balloux, an infectious disease expert based at University College London, shares Ebright’s doubts concerning the claim.

“It’s a hibecovirus, totally unrelated to SARS-CoV-1/2,” he told the Daily Mail in an interview. “It carries a furin cleavage site but many coronaviruses (outside sarbecoviruses) do. This paper tells us nothing about the origin of COVID. It just adds one more coronavirus species to the hundreds described to date.”

The study claims that CD35 and CD36 are a 54 percent genetic match for COVID.

It should be noted that five of the paper’s ten authors were affiliated with the Chinese CDC. That is Beijing’s equivalent of the US organization of the same name. It was published in Virologica Sinica, the publishing arm of the Chinese Society for Microbiology (CSM).

The CSM is linked to the state-affiliated China Association of Science and Technology which “accepts administrative supervision” from the Chinese Government’s “Ministry of Civil Affairs,” according to its website.

Virologica Sinica is edited by Dr. Shi Zhengli, also known as the “bat woman” who works inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

According to the Daily Mail, Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, which directed millions in US government funds for experiments at the Chinese lab, tweeted about the study, “Happy Saturday! Here’s a newly discovered bat β-CoV with a furin cleavage site from bats in Hainan Province China.”

He quoted the study’s dubious conclusion “…this study deepens our understanding of the diversity of CoVs & provides clues about the natural origin of the FCS of SARS-CoV-2.”

The lesson is don’t mess with bat viruses, are these people just looking for viruses to exploit like they did with the Covid Coronavirus.
The one that escaped the lab wasn’t the natural version it was one enhanced for human infectivity.
These Dr Frankensteins need reigning in.

— Parrhesia (@ParrhesiaNous) June 22, 2023

Daszak has been openly accused of orchestrating a “bullying” campaign to ensure blame for COVID was shifted away from Wuhan by pressuring 26 other scientists to sign off on a letter he wrote to the scientific journal, The Lancet. The letter claimed the virus could only have been natural in origin and to suggest otherwise creates “fear, rumors, and prejudice.”

In January 2021, Daszak joined the World Health Organization (WHO) team that was sent to Wuhan to investigate the origins of the virus.

They concluded in March 2021, that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus originated in a laboratory. Daszak has been closely linked with Chinese researchers.

Numerous investigations have been launched to determine if the virus escaped from Wuhan. President Xi Jinping’s communist administration has repeatedly denied the charge and calls it a smear campaign by “anti-China” forces, insisting the virus emerged naturally.

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